The WireColorado
The Testimony
Victor Marx has said he was made to shoot a man at seven, called in an airstrike and met Satan in person. His father was named Karl Marx. Colorado Republicans made him their nominee for governor. We checked the records his story left behind.
Marx at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, December 2022. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The silence lasted more than ten seconds.
In May, Kyle Clark of 9News in Denver sat down with Victor Marx, then the front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor of Colorado. For years Marx has told audiences that a stepfather made him shoot a man dead when he was seven, and on a podcast last year he said, “Granted, some people have to get killed, some people have to die.” So Clark asked: “Is that the only person you’ve ever killed?” Marx took a deep breath and looked up.
“Well, I would say, as a child, yes,” he said at last. “But I’ve been in other situations where, you know, possibly people or persons died as a result of me defending myself in other countries.” Had he killed people as an adult?
“Does it matter?” he said.
Clark said it did. If he had, Marx said, “I wouldn’t be telling a reporter sitting here in my training center.” And voters? “There’s no need. I don’t think that’s important.”
Days later, moderating the Republican primary debate, Clark asked how voters were supposed to tell whether Marx had lived “one of the most extraordinary lives in human history” or was “a liar and a fraud.” “I can’t help it if I’ve had an extraordinary life,” Marx said. Then he pointed to the little dog at his feet, a Dutch shepherd named Regan. “She was in Syria and Iraq,” he said, “so is she lying too?” Clark said: “Well, the dog’s not running for governor. You’re running for governor.”
Four weeks later Colorado Republicans made him their nominee. He will almost certainly lose in November; Call the Map’s forecast gives him 1 chance in 100. The better question is the one Clark kept circling: how do you check a man like this?
Not by his story. At its center is a testimony, the account an evangelical Christian gives of being saved, and a testimony is not built to be checked. No one can go back to the night he describes in Mississippi. But everything Marx built on it left paper. Call the Map read fourteen years of the ministry’s tax filings, some 70,000 records from his campaign and the committees supporting him, the county’s property records and the state’s case against his campaign. The records cannot say what happened to the boy. They say a great deal about what happened next.
IKarl Marx’s son
Start with the name, the easiest part of the story to check.
His biological father was Karl William Marx Sr., a Louisiana martial artist who, by his son’s account, was a pimp and a drug dealer who “never claimed me,” and who later found religion and founded his own fighting style, Keichu-Do, also known as “Cajun Karate.” Victor was born Vaughn Victor Kennedy, with the surname of the stepfather he says abused him. Near the end of his time in the Marines he reconciled with his father, and as an adult he took his surname.
It is an odd name to run on. In August, announcing a retired Marine colonel as his running mate, he told Fox News Digital that their all-Marine ticket would bring the “steely spines” needed to fight what he calls the rise of communism in Colorado. “I’ll say socialism, it’s just a transitionary word for communism,” he said. “Let’s just say it for what it is.” This month his father came up again, in resurfaced audio of undated remarks. Explaining why he is comfortable around people who are not white, Marx pointed to his father’s past in drugs and prostitution. “I’m a reverse coconut,” he said. “Brown on the inside, white on the outside.”
The rest of his story is harder to hear. It begins in Louisiana in 1965, with a father who did not want him and a series of stepfathers. His ministry’s biography counts seventeen houses and fourteen schools, and says that at five he was molested and left in a commercial cooler to die. He has said that when he was three a stepfather made him behead a dead cat in what he describes as a voodoo ritual, and that when he was seven the same man drove him at night into the countryside and made him shoot a man.
That last part arrived late. His memoir, published in 2008 as With God All Things Are Possible: The Victor Marx Story, describes the abuse at length, in a section that warns easily disturbed readers to skip ahead. We searched the scanned text of every edition the Internet Archive holds, from 2008 to 2013, and found no account of the killing. The earliest telling we found is from 2015, on PBS Hawai‘i, where he acknowledged, in the program’s words, that he could not substantiate it: as a boy he had not known where it happened, the body was never found and the crime was never reported. This year he told CPR it happened in rural Mendenhall, Mississippi. Sheriffs and police there told CPR they had no record of an unsolved killing from those years, which is not proof that there was none. In August the story changed again. Marx told Axios that he had not pulled the trigger after all. His stepfather had.
Even his reason for joining the Marines moves: a theft he was “looking at being sentenced” for (PBS, 2015), memories of the abuse (an Army article, 2016), the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut (CPR, this year). The memoir has the theft, from a Corpus Christi clothing store where he worked. Caught on videotape, Marx got “tender and emotional,” he writes (“I always knew the drama classes would pay off”), and played his trump card: “You wouldn’t throw me in jail when I’m going to serve in the United States Marine Corps.”
None of this is evidence that he did not suffer. Abuse rarely leaves paperwork, many survivors tell the worst of it years later or never, and no one who survived it owes the public a file. If even part of his account is true, it describes a childhood no child should have.
What he built on it is another matter. The testimony became a career, and in 2003 a ministry of his own in Colorado Springs, All Things Possible, which took him to prisons and military bases and then to northern Iraq, Kabul and Israel.
IIThe record
We collected every specific claim about his life and work that Marx or his campaign has put before voters and that could be checked against a record. There are eighteen. The record supports four of them as he tells them.
The numbers grow in the retelling. In 2017, when an Arizona congressman praised the ministry on the House floor, the figure in the Congressional Record was “over 300 young women and children” helped in Iraq. Today its biography says Marx has “helped more than 45,000 children.” His campaign website went further: more than 45,000 women and children, “many rescued from captivity.” After 9News asked about it, the line disappeared, and Marx blamed the contractor who had built the site. Asked how many people he had actually rescued, he said he could not say, for security reasons. Then he gave an estimate.
“More than one and less than a bunch.”
Victor Marx, asked by 9News how many women and children his teams have rescued
He had also said that, as a civilian, he called in an American airstrike that killed seventy Islamic State fighters. Clark said he had not realized civilians could do that. “Could you walk me through how that works?” “No,” Marx said. He now says the story is not true: he passed along intelligence, and the military acted on its own. Dave Eubank, the aid worker whose medics Marx’s ministry funded in Iraq, told the Denver Post that Marx had been in “at least one … maybe two engagements” with them under direct fire, and that he had not heard the airstrike story before Marx’s 9News interview in May.
Even stories no one has challenged change shape. In 2021 a company that sells gear for working dogs published Marx’s account of a captured Islamic State commander in Mosul: Marx let his Belgian Malinois, Scout, growl inches from the man’s face until he talked, and when the man broke his restraints, Marx sent Scout after him and he gave up. In 2024 Marx told CBN about a captured Islamic State commander in Mosul. This time he gave the man water and led him in a prayer, and at the words “in Jesus’ name” the man’s face began “morphing into a hardened, angular mask.” He broke his restraints, and soldiers tackled him. Scout was there both times.
Some claims hold up, on a smaller scale than advertised. The ledger has every one.
Of 18 claims he has put before voters, the record backs 4 as he tells them
- Documented
His biological father’s name was Karl Marx.
True. Karl William Marx Sr., a Louisiana martial artist. Victor was born Vaughn Victor Kennedy, with his stepfather’s surname, and took his father’s name as an adult.
Marx’s own Facebook post; Axios Denver, Aug. 10, 2026 - Documented
He is a Marine veteran.
True. Documents his campaign supplied show an honorable discharge after work as a high-frequency communications operator, 1983–86. By his own account he never deployed to a war zone.
Axios Denver, Aug. 10, 2026 - Documented
He evacuated Christians from Kabul as it fell in 2021.
True, on a small scale: Fox News and The Roys Report documented his ministry helping one family of eight get out. A flight for about 300 orphans could not land.
Fox News; The Roys Report, Aug. 2021 - Documented
He survived an attempt on his life at his home in 2023.
True. An arrest affidavit says a man fired at him from a trailer on his property. The man was his wife’s brother, a detail Marx said he had hoped to keep quiet.
CPR, May 20, 2026 (arrest affidavit) - True, with context
He is a seventh-degree black belt.
True, in Keichu-Do, also called “Cajun Karate”: the martial art his father founded, not a rank from an independent federation.
USAdojo; Santa Maria Times - True, with context
He holds the world record for the fastest gun disarm.
The listing is on RecordSetter, a site where anyone can upload a video of themselves: 0.28 seconds, in 2011. It is not a Guinness record. His own videos give the time as “.08.”
RecordSetter; YouTube - No record found
At seven, a stepfather made him shoot and kill a man near Mendenhall, Mississippi.
Sheriffs and police in the area say they have no record of an unsolved killing from that period. He says he told the FBI and the sheriff years later; no record of that has surfaced either. In August he told Axios that his stepfather, not he, pulled the trigger.
CPR, May 20, 2026; Axios Denver, Aug. 10, 2026 - No record found
“I’ve met Satan in person, through a person.”
His account, on his own podcast in 2020, of a teenager in a Texas youth prison who “turned reptilian” and said, “I am Satan.” There is no way to check it. His campaign says he was describing the experience through his Christian beliefs.
Talking Points Memo, as reported by the Denver Gazette, Sept. 2, 2026 - No record found
He was Charlie Kirk’s spiritual mentor.
Kirk wrote the foreword to Marx’s book, The Dangerous Gentleman. No statement by Kirk calling Marx his mentor has been found.
The American Prospect, June 30, 2026 - Withdrawn or changed
He stepped off a CH-46 helicopter at the last second before it crashed and killed everyone aboard.
The Colorado Sun found no such CH-46 crash. He now says it was a CH-53 at Twentynine Palms in 1986. A CH-53 did crash there in May 1986, and a fire killed four Marines, but it did not kill everyone aboard, and nothing public shows he was due to be on it.
Colorado Sun, as reported by Axios Denver, Aug. 10, 2026; UPI, Feb. 21, 1988 - Withdrawn or changed
His teams have served more than 45,000 women and children, many rescued from captivity.
In 2017 the figures in the Congressional Record were “over 300” women and children helped in Iraq. His ministry’s biography now says he has “helped more than 45,000 children.” The campaign’s larger version came off its website after 9News asked about it. Asked how many he had actually rescued, he said: “more than one and less than a bunch.”
9News / Kyle Clark, May 2026; All Things Possible Ministries website; Congressional Record, March 16, 2017 - Withdrawn or changed
As a civilian, he called in a U.S. airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters.
He now says that is not true: he passed along intelligence, and the military acted on its own. No official has confirmed a strike tied to him; U.S. Central Command told the Denver Post it had “nothing for you on this.”
9News; Axios Denver, Aug. 10, 2026; Denver Post, June 11, 2026 - Withdrawn or changed
He would free Tina Peters on his first day: “I’ll open the jail cell myself.”
He later settled on commuting her sentence instead. Then Gov. Jared Polis commuted it himself. Marx’s response: “I was the first one to introduce the term commute.”
Colorado Sun, May 15, 2026; KKCO, Aug. 24, 2026 - Contradicted
He has led more than 130 high-risk missions in some 30 countries.
Asked about it, he said the figure “doesn’t sound like me.” Shown his own post from 2024, he named none of the countries.
9News interview, May 2026; Colorado Sun, May 31, 2026 - Contradicted
“I pray for people, but I am not an exorcist.”
He has also called himself “the reluctant exorcist,” and he has claimed to have freed hundreds of people from demonic “attachments.” His ministry sells a feature film on spiritual warfare, The Unseen War.
The Contrarian, Sept. 1, 2026; Denver Post, June 11, 2026 - Contradicted
Former Gov. Bill Owens was endorsing him: “I got a call yesterday.”
Owens told the Colorado Sun he had not decided and would watch the campaign “for the next month or so.”
Colorado Sun, July 15, 2026 - Contradicted
Supporters could give without limit through his campaign store: “If they order merchandise, there’s no limit on that.”
Colorado caps what one person may give a candidate for governor at $1,450. The store was run by a Wyoming company whose member, a campaign filing says, is Marx; a campaign-finance lawyer called the arrangement “patently illegal.”
9News; Colorado Newsline, Aug. 3, 2026 - Contradicted
Hundreds of supporters greeted him at the State Fair, in a photo his campaign posted.
The photo was generated by AI. Pictures of the event showed a handful of people and rows of empty seats.
Westword, September 2026
His campaign’s answer is a website, Victor Marx Facts, under the motto “Documentation over accusation.” Some of its citations are still looking for their sources. The page on his military record lists “published military media documenting Victor Marx’s speaking engagements,” with the note: “This suggests there are specific articles or reports from military publications that could be cited.” The page on his name cites a photograph of Marx with his father, “likely found on Victor Marx’s official website or social media.”
Claims can be revised. A tax return, once filed, stays filed.
IIIThe reluctant exorcist
The ministry sells the testimony in many forms, and the most distinctive involves the devil. On his podcast in 2020, resurfaced by Talking Points Memo, Marx described praying for a teenager in a Texas youth prison who “turned reptilian” and, asked its name, answered: “I am Satan.” “I’ve met Satan in person,” he said, “through a person.” His campaign said he was describing the experience “through the lens of his sincerely held Christian beliefs.”
He has said demons can be drawn in by pornography or by unmarried couples living together. In a 2023 podcast, the Denver Post reported, he said his dog had sensed a supernatural presence in a couple at a swimming pool, after which he set the woman free from “five demons that had been assigned to her.” It would not be the last time a dog vouched for him. He has said, “I pray for people, but I am not an exorcist.” He has also called himself “the reluctant exorcist.”
Because the ministry files with the IRS as a charity rather than as a church, its books are public, and they show how well the testimony sells. Its income has grown more than tenfold since 2011, almost all of it from donations.
In 2011 his ministry took in $645,000. In 2024, $7.6 million.
Total revenue reported to the IRS by All Things Possible Ministries each year, nearly all of it donations.
2021: revenue doubled, to $7 million, and fundraising costs rose to 12 percent of expenses, against about 5 percent at comparable ministries.
Much of it stays in the family, and in a small circle around it. The early returns even record an “adjustment to remove personal transactions paid by credit card and loan from Victor Marx.” The name outside the family that recurs most is Buddy Jericho, whom the Guardian describes as a former Army intelligence operative. He joined the ministry’s board in 2020 and now runs Marx’s campaign. The Guardian also reported that the ministry has paid for officers’ salaries and surveillance equipment at sheriff’s offices in Florida.
The same few names run through the ministry’s books and the campaign’s
What the ministry’s tax returns and the campaign’s state filings show each person or company receiving, and how each connects back to Marx. A dash means the records show nothing.
| Who | From the ministry | From the campaign | The tie |
|---|---|---|---|
| Victor MarxFounder; the candidate | About $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, 2016–2023 | — | Trustee of the trust that sold the ministry a house; listed member of Not Shook LLC |
| Eileen MarxHis wife | An officer’s salary, $55,000 to $85,000 a year since 2016 | — | Trustee of the same trust; co-owner of Onesimus Publishing, per the ministry’s 2013–14 returns, and its registered agent in Colorado |
| Billy Bernard TrustThe Marxes’ trust | Sold it a house for $2.95 million in 2024, and lent it $1.36 million | — | A 2020 deed lists Victor and Eileen Marx as trustees |
| Their childrenShiloh, Gabriella, John-Michael, Brie | Wages for three of them since 2021: about $320,000 in all | Brie: $22,470. Shiloh: $5,000 | Shiloh is Onesimus Publishing’s other co-owner, per the 2013–14 returns |
| Onesimus PublishingPublishes Marx’s books | About $257,000 for books and “ministry resources,” 2016–2020, sold below wholesale, the returns say | — | “Eileen and Shiloh Marx are the sole shareholders,” the 2013 and 2014 returns say |
| Buddy JerichoBoard member; campaign manager | Board pay: $40,000 (2023), $80,000 (2024) | Campaign manager; paid $66,000 | Runs the two companies below (first reported by the Guardian) |
| Echo Analytics GroupIntelligence-analysis company | A $300,000 “investment” in 2019, written off by 2022 | — | Its 2019 website listed Buddy Jericho as president; the ministry’s return tied it to “management members” |
| Indago TechnologiesPrivate intelligence firm | $107,585 for “intelligence service” in 2024 | — | Jericho is its chief executive |
| Victor Marx Group LLCA company bearing his name | $60,000 for “contract services” in 2024 | — | Listed by the ministry as a related entity |
| Not Shook LLCRan the campaign store | — | Paid about $3,000 by the campaign, after paying it a $5,000 logo licensing fee | A campaign filing lists Marx as its member |
Buddy Jericho and companies he led received more than half a million dollars from the ministry from 2019 through 2024: the $300,000 investment, $107,585 for intelligence services and $120,000 in board pay.
The biggest deal was the house. For five years, in its registrations with the State of Colorado, the ministry gave its principal address as a four-bedroom house on five acres outside Colorado Springs, with a note: “no mail.” The ministry did not own the house. A family trust did. In January 2024 the ministry bought it.
A charity paid $2.95 million for a house held by its founders’ trust, and borrowed from the same trust to pay for it
The county’s figure is its market value for property tax, including an equipment shop built in 2020, and county values can lag what buyers pay. Federal tax law lets a charity buy property from its own insiders but penalizes paying them more than fair market value. The ministry’s return reports the loan, not the price.
The records, in order
- 1
· County sale record
The Billy Bernard Trust buys a five-acre property with a 1991 house in El Paso County, outside Colorado Springs, for $400,000.
- 2
· County deed
A deed on the property lists Vaughn Victor Marx and Eileen Marie Marx as the trust’s trustees. That month the ministry begins listing the house as its principal address in its registrations with the state.
- 3
· County sale record
The trust sells the property to Marx’s charity for $2.95 million. The county records the sale as not exposed to the open market.
- 4
· The charity’s IRS return
The same trust, described as “associated with board member,” lends the charity $1.36 million for the “purchase of building.”
- 5
· Campaign finance filings
Marx lists the house as his own address on contributions to his campaign.
Some of the money does reach the places in the testimony. In 2024 the ministry reported spending about $700,000 abroad, most of it in Cambodia, Iraq and Israel, without an office or an employee in any of them. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, which has accredited the ministry since 2012, requires that a majority of a member’s board be independent. On its latest return the ministry counts two independent members out of five.
By any business measure the ministry is a success: millions of dollars a year, and thousands of people in the habit of sending Marx money. In October 2025 he asked them for something new.
IVThe script
“I’m not here to make campaign promises,” he said at his launch. “I’m not even here to talk much about the problem.” He talked about an unseen war instead. This month his wife sat beside the evangelist Lou Engle and called supporters to a 21-day fast before the election: “this is not just an election, but a spiritual battle against the forces of wickedness.”
The campaign’s money came in small gifts from a crowd: about 25,000 donors, one dollar in six from outside Colorado. By mid-September the campaign had raised $3.7 million and spent nearly all of it. More than a third went to a single company, HSP Direct, a direct-mail fundraising firm in Ashburn, Virginia. Direct mail is how campaigns find new donors: the letters ask for money, and much of what they raise pays for the next round of letters.
It reported spending six times as much on fundraising as on advertising
Everything Victor Marx for Governor reported spending through Sept. 16, 2026, $3.7 million in all, in the categories the campaign chose for each payment.
The payroll looks like the ministry’s. Two of Marx’s children have been paid by the campaign. So, in July, was Kyle Rittenhouse.
The television ads came from elsewhere. A super PAC called Freedom IEC spent about $400,000 on television and YouTube ads for Marx in May and June. Two-thirds of its money came from one donor, Sema Construction, a highway builder in Centennial, most of it in a single $400,000 check on May 19. Since December, the state’s own ledger shows, the Colorado Department of Transportation has paid Sema and a joint venture it belongs to more than $100 million. Colorado’s governor appoints the head of that department. Nothing in the records connects the donation to any contract.
Some of the campaign’s money it was not allowed to take. Colorado caps what one person may give a candidate for governor at $1,450 per election. The Secretary of State’s Elections Division says the campaign took more than 200 contributions over it, calls the noncompliance “unprecedented,” and has asked a hearing officer for a fine of about $51,000. On Sept. 17 the hearing officer asked whether the state constitution requires “at least double and up to five times” the illegal amount: roughly $170,000 to $420,000, by the division’s arithmetic. The campaign has offered about $9,700 and argues that any fine under the constitution’s formula would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. “We’ve made honest mistakes,” Marx has said, “and we’ve never tried to hide them.”
The rest of the campaign follows a familiar script: the one that made Donald Trump the leader of his party. The rally stage, the merchandise, the endorsements, the crowds, the promise to free a jailed hero of the right, the contempt for the press. Marx has all of it. He is running it badly.
The endorsement he announced from Bill Owens, the last Republican governor of Colorado, had not been given. The photo of a State Fair crowd his campaign posted was generated by AI. He promised to free Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk imprisoned for her role in a breach of her county’s voting equipment, on his first day: “I’ll open the jail cell myself.” He later settled on commuting her sentence. Then Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted it himself, and Marx told a Grand Junction television station: “I was the first one to introduce the term commute.” He will debate the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Phil Weiser, he has said, only once, and only with no moderator.
In a stronger party none of it might have worked. The Colorado Republican Party of 2026 was, by its own officials’ account, a mess: its chair announced her resignation in March after two votes of no confidence, and by the end of May it was more than $270,000 in debt. The primary’s only public poll, paid for by Freedom IEC, had Marx ahead of State Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer 59 to 15. On primary night Kirkmeyer led. When the Associated Press called the race nine days after the polls closed, Marx had won by 2,515 votes out of more than half a million. Kirkmeyer called it “what appears to be the closest Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado history.” Three in five Republican voters had chosen someone else.
His own party knows what it nominated. “We’ve nominated a guy who can’t keep his fantastical stories straight,” Dick Wadhams, a former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, told CPR. “Frankly, the campaign for governor was lost the day that he won the primary.” Kirkmeyer said Marx at the top of the ticket “could be the extinction of the Republican Party.”
Go back to the ten seconds.
“Does it matter?” is an odd answer from anyone running for governor, and from Marx it is the most revealing thing he has said in this campaign.
The testimony asks for faith, and people who have heard him preach in prisons and churches say he helped them. Nothing in this story is evidence that he did not. If his account of his childhood is true, the right response to it is sympathy, not a governorship.
But the testimony was also a product, and the records of what it earned are not a matter of faith. Colorado’s governor signs budgets, grants pardons, and answers to courts for things that have dates and numbers.
It does matter. We checked.